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Mandi Bishop is a hardcore health data geek with a Master's in English and a passion for big data analytics, which she brings to her role as Dell Health’s Analytics Solutions Lead. She fell in love with her PCjr at 9 when she learned to program in BASIC. Individual accountability zealot, patient engagement advocate, innovation lover and ceaseless dreamer. Relentless in pursuit of answers to the question: "How do we GET there from here?" More byte-sized commentary on Twitter: @MandiBPro.

Given its location in the heart of Silicon Valley, it may not be remarkable that El Camino Hospital was the first hospital in the US to implement EMR. What IS remarkable is that El Camino implemented EMR 51 years ago, leveraging an IBM mainframe system that Lockheed Martin refactored for healthcare from its original intended use for the space program.

Take a moment to process that. El Camino didn’t need PPACA, Meaningful Use, HITECH, or HIPAA to tell them health data is critical. El Camino saw the value in investing in healthcare IT for electronic data capture and communication without federal incentive programs or lobbyists. With that kind of track record of visionary leadership, it’s no wonder they became early analytics program adopters, and recently turned to Health Care DataWorks (HCD) as a trusted partner.

When I sat down with executive leadership from El Camino and HCD to discuss the journey up Tom Davenport‘s analytics maturity scale from rudimentary operational reporting to advanced analytics, I expected a familiar story of cost pressure, clinical informatics, quality measure incentives or alternative payment models as the business drivers for new insights development. Instead, I heard the burgeoning plan for a visionary approach to patient engagement and “analytics-driven compassionate care”.

Greg Walton, CIO of El Camino Hospital, admitted that initial efforts to implement an analytics program had resulted in “textbook errors”: “’Competing on Analytics’ was easier to write than execute,” he said. Their early efforts to adopt and conform to a commercially-available data model were hindered by the complexity of the solution and the philosophy of the vendor. “One of the messages I would give to anybody is: do NOT attempt this at home,” Greg laughed, and El Camino decided to change their approach. They sought a “different type of company…a real-life company with applicable lessons learned in this space.”

“The most important thing to remember in this sector: you’re investing in PEOPLE. This is a PEOPLE business,” Greg said. “And that if there’s any aspect of IT that’s the most people-oriented, it’s analytics. You have to triangulate between how much can the organization absorb, and how fast they can absorb it.” In HCD, El Camino found an analytics organization partner whose leadership and resources understand healthcare challenges first, and technology second.

“The people (at HCD) have all worked in hospitals, and many still work there occasionally. Laypersons do not have the same understanding; HCD’s exposure to the healthcare provider environment and their level of experience provides a differentiator,” Greg explained. HCD impressed with their willingness to roll up their sleeves and work with the hospital stakeholders to address macro and micro program issues, from driving the evaluation and prioritization of analytics projects to identifying the business rules defining discharge destination. And both the programmers and staff are “thrilled,” Greg says: “My programmers are so happy, they think they’ve died and gone to heaven!”

This collaborative approach to adopting analytics as a catalyst for organizational and cultural change has lit a fire to address the plight of the patient using data as a critical tool. Greg expounded upon his vision to achieve what Aggie Haslup, Vice President of Marketing for HCD, termed “analytics-driven compassionate care”:

We need to change the culture about data without losing, and in fact enhancing, our culture around compassion. People get into healthcare because they’re passionate about compassion. Data can help us be more compassionate. US Healthcare Satisfaction scores have been basically flat over the last 10 years. Lots of organizations have tried to adopt other service industry tools: LEAN,6S; none of those address the plight of the patient. We’ve got to learn that we have to go back to our roots of compassion. We need to get back to the patient, which means “one who suffers in pain.” We want (to use data) to help understand more about person who’s suffering. My (recent) revelation: what do you do w/ guests in your house? Clean the house, put away the pets, get food, do everything you can to make guests comfortable. We want to know more about patients’ ethnicity, cultural heritage, the CONTEXT of their lives because when you’re in pain, what do you fall back on? Cultural values. We want a holistic view of the patient, because we can provide better, compassionate care through knowing more about patients. We want to deploy a contextual longitudinal view of the patient…and detect trends in satisfaction with demographics, clinical, medical data.

What a concept. Imagine the possibilities when a progressive healthcare provider teams with an innovative analytics provider to harness the power of data to better serve the patient population. I will definitely keep my eye on this pairing!

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